Betterment

Swap paper plates for fine china, take-out for gourmet home-cooked fare, and LED lighting for the glow of flickering candles, and you significantly change how a dinner at home feels. An otherwise ho-hum meal is transformed into something special, with different vibes and the sparkle of romance.  Everyone recognizes that intentionally setting the mood for […]

Here’s a simple grid that might change the way you think about internal stories: When we believe in something that’s useful but not true, it can serve a helpful purpose. The tooth fairy…

Presented an Obsidian Wikidata plugin at the Wikidata data modelling event 2023

The word on the street is the latest Disney animated movie, “Wish” is a box office disaster. And it was by no means the first, either. It turns out it’s

How about an astrolabe? Or even a watch? Technology advances, and sooner or later, the old stuff gets left behind. It’s easy to romanticize some of the classic devices that we built civilizat…

Traditional fairytale structure fits naturally in our brains, and thus can guide strategic problem-analysis, and a plan that everyone understands.

Being genuinely smart isn’t just about having a high IQ or being a whiz at trivia. According to psychology, there’s much more to intelligence than that. It’s about how you […] More

Most of us know about the recent brouhaha of Sam Altman and OpenAI. The big story, of course, is what on earth made the staff react this way? It’s clear

They’re almost always conservative. Whether it’s a governmental body, the strategy group at a big company or the membership panel at the local country club, we can learn a lot by seeing…

Motivation Memorizing the periodic table has some practical value, especially if you're a chemist, but in any case it's an interesting exercise, easier to do than it may sound. And it's a case study for how you might memorize other things of more practical value to you personally. Major system pegs The Major system is

People talk about Hobson’s choice as if it’s always a bad thing. A liveryman in pre-industrial London, he rented horses. And every customer was allowed to take the horse closest to the …

Intentional recovery is a sustainable investment in the next wave of performance and can break the day into a series of short, highly engaged sprints.

If you’re a freelancer or a contractor of any kind, it’s typical to be asked for an estimate or a quote. And if you’ve been doing business for a while, it’s likely that you&…

Why do we convince ourselves that we cannot learn certain skills or subjects? A dive into what makes learning hard and how we can make it easier.

Smoked Brisket tastes better in Texas. Bagels taste better in New York. Haggis tastes better in Scotland. Coffee tastes better in Santo Domingo. Yes, a

The opposite of the straw man argument: the steel man technique. “Put simply, it’s building the best form of the other

If you’re trying to reduce risk, do the hard part first. That way, if it fails, you’ll have minimized your time and effort. On the other hand, if you’re looking for buy-in and com…

Unread emails can be a source of anxiety for a lot of people. So instead of trying to read, filter or delete everything in your inbox, what if you just ignored it?In this episode, New York Times technology reporter Taylor Lorenz shares how spending less time on email and changing the way she thought about online communication has increased her productivity and given her back hours of time.

The case for inbox infinity

Exactly. That’s why it’s a forecast, not an accurate account of what’s going to happen in the future. This seems axiomatic, but our desire for certainty keeps letting us down. The…

When it slams into your house and destroys it, we’re likely to pursue one of two lines of thinking: –How did I cause this? What choices did I make, what mistakes did I permit, why did I…

Today’s post was written by our Advisor, General E. John "Dragon" Teichert (Ret). When I took command of legendary Edwards Air Force Base, it was

A tool for hyper-productivity and success.

Lana Swartz coined this term in her breakthrough paper on crypto. A scam always involves a transaction. In the traditional fraud, the scammer tells a lie and the buyer, either with or without dilig…

From beginners to experts, this is where hackers level up! Join today and learn how to hack.

If you’re gonna join an early stage1 startup, there are a few questions that I think you should ask the founders. This is by no means a comprehensive list. In fact most of these questions are obvious, but sometimes the obvious ones are the important ones. Also, I’m not exactly an expert on startups, these are just based off of my limited experience. What does the company do? This is a really obvious question and yet it will reveal a lot.

A gift doesn’t diminish the giver. Sharing creates connection, possibility and energy. And the magic of gratitude is that it improves everything it touches, especially the person who offered …